Rescue workers found the body of a fourth miner in a flooded coal mine in south Wales, dashing hopes that the last trapped miner would be found alive as a close-knit community was forced to confront the kind of tragedy it thought it had left long in the past.
South Wales Chief Constable Peter Vaughan called the unfortunate outcome of the search-and-rescue operation on Friday “the one that none of us wanted,” because police had held out hope of finding some of the miners alive. It is Britain’s worst fatal mining accident in years.
Officials do not know what caused the accident at the Gleision Colliery near Swansea, in south Wales, an area once synonymous with coal mining, but where the industry all but disappeared since Britain’s labor strife of the 1980s.
Photo: AFP
“This is the end that we all feared but hoped against hope wouldn’t happen,” British Member of Parliament Peter Hain said. “This has been a stab right through the heart of these local communities.”
The four miners have been named as Phillip Hill, 45, Charles Bresnan, 62, David Powell, 50, and Garry Jenkins, 39.
Three other miners managed to get out of the mine after the accident on Thursday morning. One was in the hospital listed as critically ill, while the two others escaped largely unharmed and were aiding in the rescue operation.
British Prime Minister David Cameron called the mining tragedy “a desperately, desperately sad situation,” adding that there would be “sorrow” in the community as it came to terms with its loss.
Rescue teams had been working around the clock, pumping water out of the pit, excavating blockages and shoring up the tunnels. Divers trying to reach the men had been earlier forced to abandon their attempts.
Hain extended his sympathies to the miners’ families — sentiments echoed by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who said he was praying for all involved.
“We thought in south Wales that the days of mining accidents were behind us, but we were wrong,” Wales First Minister Carwyn Jones said, extending his thoughts and sympathies to the family and praising rescue workers.
“All that was humanly possible was done,” he said, adding that people around the world are standing shoulder to shoulder with those affected by the tragedy.
Cameron is being updated regularly on the situation and has been in touch with local police and Hain, a spokeswoman for the prime minister said.
The mine burrowed into a steep and isolated hillside, is one of the few remainders of Britain’s once-mighty mining industry.
South Wales’ mining industry was immortalized in Richard Llewellyn’s novel How Green Was My Valley, whose film version won the 1941 US Academy Award as best picture. Cardiff, Wales’ main port city, once led the world in coal exports.
However, Britain’s Conservative government under former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher shut down most of the country’s mines following a year-long showdown in 1984 with the miners’ union. In the year of the strike, there were 196,000 miners working in Britain; now there are about 6,000.
The worst mining accident in British history was in 1913, when 439 miners were killed in a gas -explosion at the Senghenydd colliery in South Wales. In a 1966 disaster that shocked the world, an avalanche of coal sludge buried a school in the village of Aberfan, killing 116 children and 28 adults.
Seven people have been killed in mining accidents in Britain since 2006, according to British Health and Safety Executive statistics. That is low relative to other countries. In the US, 14 miners have been killed in accidents in the first half of this year alone.
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